


The Fake Boxcar Child

by Morning66



Category: The Boxcar Children - Gertrude Chandler Warner
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:48:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24511825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morning66/pseuds/Morning66
Summary: In Benny’s mind, he’s always lived with his grandfather, the boxcar a club house planted firmly in the backyard.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 12





	The Fake Boxcar Child

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little thing I wrote about Benny. :)

Once, when Benny Alden is a few weeks shy of eighteen, he goes to a school dance with a girl by the name of Sally Richards. He wears a tuxedo his grandfather bought him, fitted just right, and a pink tie to match his date's pink dress. They dance on the the hardwood of their school's gym alongside a hundred other couples, him mainly just concentrating hard on not stepping on her slender bare feet.

Benny doesn't love her, nowhere near, and he knows she doesn't love him either, but she's sweet and kind and they both wanted a date. Together they drink punch and snag more cookies than allowed, laughing at the teachers breaking up couples dancing too close. When the night is over and done with, she suggests they go back to his house and he agrees, not missing the wink she sends him, but choosing to ignore it.

She suggests they go inside, but he rebuffs her gently, not wanting anything too serious to go down between him and a girl he barely knows anything about, except that she sits three seats over in math. They end up walking around the grounds, quiet foot falls loud in the silent night, his hand tangled in hers. They stop when they reach the boxcar, looming wide and dark in the backyard.

"What's that?" Sally asks, confused.

" A boxcar," Benny answers simply, receiving a light slap from his date.

"I know that, silly! I mean why's it there?"

Benny shrugs his shoulders. "We lived in it once."

Sally's eyes are luminous in the dark, wide and disbelieving. "Really?"

Benny nods and attempts a brief explanation which is abruptly interrupted by a kiss. From there, everything becomes muddled and distracted and his explanation falls by the wayside, replaced with a make out session in his childhood home.

Nothing significant ever ends up happening with Sally. They date for a few weeks, before breaking up and never see each other again after graduation that spring. It'd be the kind of fleeting romance that fades into obscurity were it not for their interaction that night. No, not the kissing (though it had been decent kissing), but her staring at him, questioning whether he had really lived lived in a boxcar as a child.

It stays with him as the years pass, because so many times he wonders the exact same thing.

It's not something he'd ever admit to any of his siblings who have such strong memories, both good and bad, of those days. When they talk of them, sitting around the dining room table after the dinner plates have been cleared, home from college and later work and families of their own, Benny laughs along with them. He smiles as they describe how the girls decorated it the best they could, how they all worked so hard. He nods seriously when they discuss Violet's sickness, their parents' deaths.

While he responds to the memories the way he's expected to, they are only stories to him, tales that have been repeated so often he takes them for fact. Those long ago days, they are his siblings' reality, not his. He remembers the stories, sure, but not via firsthand experience. When he recollects these scenes it's not images, but the voices of his siblings speaking with certainty and conviction.

In Benny's eyes, he has always lived with his grandfather and the boxcar has always been in the backyard. It is a club house, a place to play, a place to show friends, a place to make noise when his grandfather wants silence. It is not a home, not a place they once lived in, once did everything in.

Many times he wishes he remembers those days, but even when he stretches his mind as far back as it can go, he cannot. He has a few shards here and there, but nothing cohesive to connect him with the old boxcar in his backyard, not the way his siblings do. The boxcar has become something that so defines his family that Benny sometimes feels like a heretic for not remembering, a hidden atheist amongst the true believers.

Benny knows he can never tell them that he doesn't remember something so fundamental, so deeply ingrained in all his siblings. So instead, when they tell their stories he smiles and laughs and nods and repeats back what he's been told. It's not the same, though. There's always a disconnect there, even though they don't see it. He's the wolf in sheep's clothing, the house boy in the midst of the boxcar children.


End file.
